Author Archive for Nicki Benson

Profile

Founder of Esperanza Education. Coordinator of the Spanish for Social Justice Teacher Network. Education Consultant for organizations such as Kwi Awt Stelmexw, UNICEF-Peru, and Innovations for Poverty Action. View full profile.

Posts by Nicki:

A Journey in Multilingual Blogging On July 1st, 2013 we launched the Esperanza blog: Language, Learning, and Culture. Five women with a love for progressive language education, but different backgrounds and interests, came together to share their ideas. Today we have a growing archive

A Song by Kukama Children in Defense of their Native Language This video features a beautiful song and rap by the children of Nauta, Loreto in the Peruvian Amazon about saving their native language, Kukama-Kukamiria. The children go around removing the tape that covers each other̵

A Year Was Not Enough to See it All in Spain In 2006, I got a job teaching English in the small town of Cuenca in Spain. I had never heard of Cuenca before and it was a long and nerve-racking journey to get there but it was definitely worth it. Although at times it was difficult livin

Dedication in Rural Education Over the last two months, I have been travelling to small communities in the Cusco region of Peru for our (UNICEF) research project on intercultural bilingual schools. It has been a beautiful, educational, and humbling experience for me. The goal of Inter

The Wonder of WordReference What is it? WordReference.com is a great set of online dictionaries to translate between English and fifteen other languages. It also has dictionaries for Spanish-French and Spanish-Portuguese, as well as verb conjugators and games for several languages. It

What Language Learning and Martial Arts Have in Common Last week I went to a Muay Thai kickboxing class for the first time in months. I was comfortable until the last part of the class when the teacher had us go up in pairs for light sparring rounds (practice fights). I do Muay Thai f

Everyday Spanish Words with a Peruvian Twist Spanish is spoken a little differently in each country, as I explain here. I have lived in Mexico and Spain, and travelled to various countries throughout Central and South America. Now I live in Peru and I have noticed that Peruvians use c

An Introduction to Runasimi Quechua (known as Runasimi, “people’s language”, in Quechua) is an Indigenous language spoken by 8-12 million people throughout South America, mainly in the Andean regions of Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, as well as some speakers in Colombia

Using Comics for Language Learning Reading comic strips can be a really fun way to practice a new language. As with illustrated books and graphic novels, the visual stimulus of the pictures can help learners to understand the story even if they do not recognize all of the vocabulary.

Translating Citizen Media for the World What is it? “Global Voices is a community of more than 700 authors and 600 translators around the world who work together to bring you reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard i